Mmm, can’t seem to get to sleep tonight, I stayed up late watching TV, then when I went to bed I couldn’t sleep (Darn Start Trek Voyager! Somebody just get rid of the Holodec already, it’s always causing trouble…).
So I thought I’d wander around downstairs for a bit, then I remembered I hadn’t blogged since last week. Well, what’s happened since then? MacWorld San Francisco came and went and gave us some interesting goodies from Apple, new iMac and new ‘MacBook Pro‘ laptops (the name does grow on you, but the impending loss of the ‘PowerBook‘ brand is hard to take a bit).
Mr. Powerbook, meet Mr. Floor.
On the subject of Powerbooks, unfortunately my 4 year old Titanium PowerBook G4 had a bit of an accident last Sunday, I was about to leave the house to head down to The Gate with it in my bag when the strap came unclipped and it went, “thuuummmp.” to the floor. The words, “Oh crap” came to mind.
I didn’t check it until I got down the road, I took it out and, yep, a big crack on the left hand corner of the upper titanium casing with a couple of smaller cracks at other points. The bottom of the case at the corner was peeling back and had a bent bit pushed out where something inside had squeezed out. I managed to push it back in a bit and pushed the bottom of the case up into place a bit.
Fortunately the machine still works, it came awake quite happily when I opened it up and it seems to work ok. It just looks pretty wrecked now! Kind of a sad thing to happen after all the hard work we’ve done together! Hopefully it should be covered by my business insurance but I’m not sure how that will work out because of the age of the machine.
Nursery rhymes with, um… Penguin?
…Well, Natalie started Nursery last week, she goes every morning from 8.50am until 11.20am. She was really excited about starting and she’s really enjoyed it. There’s been a lot of painting and art going on, so any relatives or friends are liable to be gifted with some genuine Natalie artwork! It’s been fun getting up in the morning with Natalie around as Natalie and Annie were usually asleep when I got up for work before. Now Natalie comes shuffling through to our room when she hears our alarm go off. It’s very cute when she appears still in her grobag having negotiated the stairs still wearing it!!!
Today Annie took Natalie to see the movie ‘March of the Penguins‘ at the DCA, Natalie enjoyed it mostly but they left early as Natalie said, “I is a bit bored now Mummy”. It was a bit slow for the length of movie so it’s maybe not surprising. Oh, and apparently Morgan Freeman needed to just shut up for a bit so we could hear the antarctic instead. I think that’s what Annie said anyway! :) I’ve still never been to the movies with Natalie yet, although this was only her second time having watched Madagascar previously.
Sunday Morning Live Saturday Night Live
After what seems like ages we finally managed to go live for the first time last Sunday broadcasting the church service at The Gate. It was a small scale start with only a 160 x 120 pixel MPEG4 movie stream but it seemed to work pretty well.
Our main limitation just now is that our broadband connection only has 256kb upload capacity which limits us as the church already does an audio broadcast too. However, we should be getting an additional connection purely for the video feed and this will also have a 512kb upload, so hopefully we’ll be able to do a 320 x 240 pixel stream soon.
If you want to check it out go to The Gate website and click on the ‘Live Audio’ link and you’ll see the links for the audio and video streams. They are only active on Sunday morning between about 10.30am – 1pm UK time. That’s an approximate timescale, the meeting runs from 11am until about 12.30pm but sometimes it runs over a bit.
There will also be an archive of previous weeks audio and video which are already in the larger format, I’m still working on the system for that though.
If anyone is interested in the technical details of how this all works then here’s a quick overview of the setup used:
Internal encoding kit:
- Apple Mac Mini (1gb Ram) OSX 10.4
- 160gb External Firewire RAID array
- Miglia Analogue to Digital converter
- 17″ LCD monitor
- Wirecast software
External Broadcast server:
- 3ghz Pentium 4, 2gb Ram, Fedora Core 3 Linux
- Apple’s Darwin Streaming Server (Open source version of Quicktime Streaming Server)
And finally…
I just wrote quite a bit there, that’s about it for now though really. Oh yeah, the out-door concrete skatepark is almost finished now, go to www.dundeeconcrete.com to check it out, hopefully another couple of weeks or so and then I can skate it!
Let’s hope I can sleep now…
Good night ;) z z z z z z z z
~Rick